Economics.

There's been some discussions about stimulus packages on the various internet forums I frequent. I've been mostly quiet on the subject.

It seems to me that the Keynes model says that when times are tough, capital needs to be injected into the system. This actually has roots even in Adam Smith's 1776 work defining capitalism as an economic system; the wealth of nations comes from the flow of capital.

Further refinements to Keynes state that the capital needs to be injected at the lower levels of the economy. Why? Because if you give money to poor people they will spend it. Thus, the money will flow through the economy, benefiting it at every stage until it reaches the rich. If you give it to rich people, who already have money to spend, they will simply keep it. That does not encourage the flow of capital, it encourages hoarding of capital.

This is the model for the stimulus package. Earmarks and Republican attempts to derail it notwithstanding.

However, no one is looking at it from a monetary theory perspective.

What happens when you inject unbacked money into a system? Inflation. Money that isn't backed by anything can only have its worth judged by the proportion of GDP (gross domestic product) it represents. When a large amount of money is printed (or coined from non-precious metals) over a short period of time and the GDP does not reflect that change, then each unit of currency becomes a smaller portion of that GDP.

It's important to note that money is not capital. Money is merely a numeric accounting of capital. It REPRESENTS capital; it is not capital itself. If it is backed on a fixed basis by something valuable, it is a reasonable substitute for capital, but if it is unbacked, it's just a divisor for GDP.

The Keynesian model calls for injection of capital into the system. We pretend that's what we're doing by saying that we're borrowing money from future projected revenue, but what we're actually doing is just printing money -- changing the divisor.

Quite frankly, the only way the Keynes model works like it's supposed to is either by the fortuitous increase in some resource that occurs simultaneously with the spending program, or by confiscatory taxes against the richest to force their hoardings back into the flow of the economy.

And the latter option is labeled socialist. Folks, socialism as an economic system means that the government actually OWNS the means of production. Confiscatory taxes and forced egalitarianism is not socialism. It's not properly communism nor fascism either.

In communism, each business would be owned by all the people that work for it. Imagine every corporation as a profit-sharing co-op.

In economic fascism (separate from political fascism), government forces public revenue through private corporations.

The redistribution of capital through the economy is still capitalism, even if it's forced. No, it really is. The difference is that it's no longer laissez-faire when it's forced. But even Adam Smith was not in favor of completely unrestrained commerce. He recognized the need for regulation, and even cautioned against "self-regulation", saying that businesses will, and have, deceived and oppressed the public.

Work stuffs.

We're in the middle of a big campaign at work to take a LOT of pictures with our fancy new 135 megapixel camera. We're having storage issues, and we are having trouble getting the IT office to understand what it means to take several THOUSAND pictures that each take about 400MB to store as raw data, then process them into viewable format as 380MB uncompressed TIFF images and then color-correct them and save them for actual use as 100% quality JPEGs at about 250MB per image.

In that respect, I've been looking into recommendations for storage. one of the things I've found that seems like an excellent possibility is the Drobo. As it turns out, Scott Bourne is giving away one. All I have to do to have a chance at it is to drive a LITTLE bit of traffic to his site. Just click on his name. Please?

There's still work to be done.

There's still a bit more than 25% of people who believe the Bush presidency was a success because of one or more of the following:

We kilt us a bunch o' them thar towel-wearing furriners! Dhimmitude, dude!

We raised education standards without granting the funding to meet them!

We passed a Medicare prescription drug benefit that allows the drug companies to arbitrarily set the price the government has to pay!

We removed all that unnecessary regulation and gave the financial system the opportunity to show how well it can work with no oppressive governmental oversight!

We taught the people of the nation just how unreliable government assistance can be, despite appointing the best possible candidates for the various federal emergency response leadership positions!

We clarified for the nation exactly who is subject to the rule of law, which is to say that it's a matter of determination for the executive branch alone!

We clarified the status of the Vice Presidency, which is neither part of the executive branch nor the legislative branch!

We established that whenever we are involved in an undeclared but warlike conflict, the nebulous status of that conflict means that we can abrogate the international agreements and internal laws and regulations that deal with all martial conflicts, not just declared wars!

We established that, based on the saber-rattling of an under-informed but over-confident dictator and evidence picked because it supported our goals and 20-years-past behavior that WE provided materiel support for, we can invade and overthrow the government of a sovereign nation!

We've shown that it's possible to undertake such an invasion without any understanding of the culture or politics of the nation being invaded, have no clear plan for the aftermath of the overthrow, have no clear definition of success, define it instead vaguely as independence and democracy for the invaded nation, and yet continually ignore requests to LET them have their own independent democracy by defining leaving the nation "prematurely" as failure!

We've shown that it's impossible to support the men and women who put themselves in harm's way without also wholeheartedly supporting the conflict they've been ordered into, no matter how poorly thought out by their superiors!

We've shown that it's impossible to disagree with foreign policy, domestic policy, or the rising tide of integration of government with a specific religion without being accused of lacking patriotism and wishing ill on the nation!

We've shown that even our own citizens are not subject to the protections of the Constitution and the law regarding warrants and searches -- even when the warrants are issued on a near rubber-stamp basis by the court with jurisdiction and the search can begin 3 whole days before the warrant is even applied for -- if the executive branch thinks there might be some reason for suspicion!

From Dave Haynie

The terrorist threat is just another <fnord>.... it's a political tool used by the right to make you nervous enough to ceed freedoms for a little false security.

If live in the USA and you're worried about a terrorist attack, you're a frickin idiot. Period. There is no other explanation... your best course of action, if you can't buy yourself at least one clue, is immediate suicide... at least in that, you'll raise the aggreate intellect of the country a small but measurable bit.

Your odds of dying, sometime in your life: 1 : 1
Odds of dying from:

 Shark attack                      1 : 300,000,000
 Terrorist attack                  1 : 9,300,000
 Snake bite                        1 : 628,000
 Spider bite                       1 : 593,000
 Tsunami                           1 : 500,000
 Fireworks related                 1 : 341,000
 Asteroid impact                   1 : 200,000
 Changes in air pressure           1 : 162,000
 Flood                             1 : 144,000
 Dog attack                        1 : 140,000
 War                               1 : 135,000
 Earthquake                        1 : 117,000
 Stuck by lightning                1 : 80,000
 Cave-in related                   1 : 76,000
 Hot tap water related             1 : 69,700
 Capital punishment                1 : 62,500
 Tornado                           1 : 60,000
 Insect sting                      1 : 57,000
 Accident at work                  1 : 43,500
 Air travel                        1 : 20,000
 Hot weather related               1 : 13,700
 Death by cop                      1 : 12,100
 Drowning in bath tub              1 : 11,000
 Accidental electrocution          1 : 10,000
 Road accident                     1 : 9,300
 Choking on vomit                  1 : 8,500
 Drowning in swimming pool         1 : 6,700
 Cold related                      1 : 5,500
 Microbes                          1 : 5,400
 Accidental gun related            1 : 5,100
 Alcohol related                   1 : 4,700
 ANY natural disaster              1 : 3,357
 Surgical complications            1 : 1,300
 Accidental choking                1 : 1,250
 Smoke/fire/flames                 1 : 1060
 ANY Drowning                      1 : 1,008
 Poor diet/exercise                1 : 1,000
 Tobacco related                   1 : 919
 Falling                           1 : 246
 ANY assault                       1 : 217
 Poisioning/exposure               1 : 180
 Suicide                           1 : 116
 ANY motor vehicle accident        1 : 100
 Stroke                            1 : 24
 ANY injury                        1 : 23
 Cancer                            1 : 7
 Heart disease                     1 : 5

So basically, if fear of terrorism is big with you, you're stupid. Bigtime. You get to ride the short bus, and you should have a person with at least an IQ of 70 review all of your decisions from now on. You ARE what's wrong with this country, and if you weren't such a blithering idiot, I'd try to explain this to you in longer words... but I'm sure they have always confused you. Yes, you are a troglodyte, and clearly will always be one, but you may advance to the head of the pack.

See, this country has given even the likes of you the right to vote (in a country where every zoo had a half dozen monkeys who probably got higher SAT scores than you did). Do yourself a favor, a personal favor, and vote for Democrats this fall. That might be the only useful thing you can every possible achieve in your life... don't waste the chance.

Looking at the list here, if you're actually afraid of dying for any reason, your best defense isn't "fighting the terrorists", it's realizing national healthcare. That's not even a remote question, there are 6 orders of magnitude between the two. But hey, if you were afraid of "the terrorists", you don't know what that means, and are incapable of learning.

You know what, climate skeptics? You're right.

There's no reason at all to believe that a chaotic system like the weather, that changes outputs so radically with such small changes in inputs will be in any way affected by LARGE changes in inputs such as those that would result from desequestering huge amounts of formerly-sequestered carbon over the period of a mere century.

Nor is there any reason to believe that there's anything like a tipping point, where things like Siberian peat bogs or deep Atlantic clathrates could warm up just enough to release their sequestered methane and in turn cause even more warming on the surrounding bogs and/or oceans and create a feedback cycle.

So, yeah, there's no reason to believe that climate change could happen more suddenly than expected, and so no reason to change slowly now in a planned way instead of speedily later when things go all to heck.

Because unstable weather does not mean that things like drastically altered rainfall patterns could occur, so there won't be dramatic droughts in some places, floods in others, cold spells and heat waves at very odd times and in odd locations, coastal sea levels rising, glaciers disappearing and eliminating lots of water supply from mountainous and arctic regions. None of that could possibly happen.

Since none of that could possibly happen, then we don't have to worry about New Orleans flooding again, about Florida losing millions of acres of low-lying land to the rising sea, or about the droughts and floods playing havoc with our Great Plains food supply (already under assault from ethanol).

On Cecil.

Just remember, folks, that "The Straight Dope" can also mean "The Heterosexual Idiot."

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